According to Flowers, there are two major motivations that lead children to run away from home. The first is to avoid an emotional experience that they expect to occur. The second is to escape a painful or difficult experience in their life. (Flowers.R.B, 2001). Schaffner indicates that young people choose to run away from dysfunctional homes or homes with physically, emotionally and sexually abusive environments, such as parental harassment, violence, parental drugs and alcohol abuse, neglect and other family problems.(Schaffner.L, 1999)
Family instability
The relationship between family problems and running away is highly related. Children who live with parents who always having conflicts and fight in front of kids will make kids feel annoyed with these situation, especially kids or teenagers who are still studying. They might lack of parental warmth and support from their parents that lead them felt that home did not mean anything to them anymore. (Dadds, Braddock, Cuers, Elliott, & Kelly, 1993; Schweitzer, Hier, & Terry, 1994). According to this study, teenagers that experienced running away from home will have a low level of warmth and support, high level of rejection and may experience child abuse before that lead them to run away. In addition, many children who run away from home also have a history of school behavior problem. This is because their parents lack of attention to them and make them give up with themselves. Clearly, parenting styles is the main causes of this issue that cause running away from home cases increase throughout the day.
Mental status
Aside from family problem, mental status of children also a factor that contribute to this problem. For example, they might face problem in their academic or relationship with friend or partner, and they do not know how to speak it out or release the stress. They have been found to have higher rates of depression compared with non- runaway teens. These children